Category: Veterans’ Affairs Department

The Veterans’ Affairs Office of the Inspector General released a report yesterday which charges that 307,000 veterans died awaiting treatment over the last several years, according to CNN.

The report adds that an internal VA investigation in 2010 found staffers had hidden veterans’ applications in their desks so they could process them at a later time, but human resources later recommended the staffers responsible not be disciplined.

Scott Davis, a program specialist at the VA Health Eligibility Center, said thousands more veterans who have returned from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have not received care because of being erroneously placed in the enrollment system’s backlog.

He said many of these combat veterans have since lost their five-year eligibility for care due to the delay.

The article quotes from the report cases all the way back to the 1980s, so it’s like I’ve been saying all along – this is a cultural issue within the VA, it can’t be blamed on a single administration, except that, now that it’s been exposed, no one seems to be doing anything about it.

From the Associated Press;

About one-third of the 867,000 veterans with pending applications are likely deceased, the report says, adding that “data limitations” prevent investigators from determining how many now-deceased veterans applied for health care benefits or when. The applications go back nearly two decades, and officials said some applicants may have died years ago.

More than half the applications listed as pending as of last year do not have application dates, and investigators “could not reliably determine how many records were associated with actual applications for enrollment” in VA health care, the report said.

The report also says VA workers incorrectly marked thousands of unprocessed health-care applications as completed and may have deleted 10,000 or more electronic “transactions” over the past five years.

Largely, the problem isn’t the superior healthcare professionals, it’s the drones who stand between veterans and their doctors.

Department of Veterans’ Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald spoke to the American Legion convention yesterday and according to the Military Times, he blamed Congress for the Department’s dysfunctional operations;

[McDonald] pushed back against the idea that VA’s problems are beyond repair, and also refuted recent suggestions from politicians about dismantling the $160 billion-plus agency.

“Some people in Washington are questioning the need for VA. Others have attempted to squeeze the needs of veterans within a ‘sequester’ budget that artificially constrains the budget,” he said.

“All of this … leads to the same place: A place where the needs of veterans are secondary to ideology, scoring political points, and shortsighted budget policies. A place where VA is set up to fail.”

No one is saying that the VA’s problems can’t be fixed. What we’re saying is that this administration won’t do what needs to be done to fix it. But, that thing that McDonald said about the needs of veterans are subjugated to politics applies more to him and the White House than Congress. For example the Vet Choice program which was designed to alleviate the crush of medical treatment for veterans on the VA system by farming it out to the private sector was defunded by this administration before it even had a chance to begin, and the White House tried to divert funds into other things.

While I don’t believe that completely privatizing the VA is a good idea, Vet Choice was a good stop-gap measure when the VA wasn’t meeting the needs of veterans, and bureaucrats were taking shortcuts that cost vets their health and their lives in some cases. By the way, none of the bureaucrats suffered for those shortcuts – and therein lies the problem. The problem that McDonald won’t address publicly or privately.

The Washington Examiner reports that the Veterans’ Affairs Department’s Office of the Inspector General conducted a no-notice inspection of a Los Angeles office and discovered letters from veterans which were scheduled for the shredder, but they hadn’t been opened or read. Eight of the nine would have had an impact on those veterans’ claims;

“Of the nine claims-related documents, five did not have required initials of both the employee and supervisor and the remaining four had only the employee’s initials,” the report said. “If … staff and their supervisors followed VBA policy, these nine claims-related documents would not have been placed in personal shred bins that are designated for non-claims related documents.”

The report said if the OIG had not stepped in, “it is likely that. … staff would have inappropriately destroyed the nine claims-related documents we found.”

The office couldn’t provide to the OIG a record of the documents that they had shredded over the past few years. Well, at least the VA has found a way to do away with the backlog of claims like they promised.

According to KARE11 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the VA there is sending out notices to a few hundred veterans who had their claims for traumatic brain injuries denied when the were examined by unqualified medical personnel.

Instead of being examined by a specialist, records reveal at least one case in which a veteran was denied TBI benefits based on an examination by a nurse practitioner.

[…]

According to VA documents obtained by KARE 11, the Minneapolis VA used unqualified staffers “from 2010 through 2014” to conduct initial TBI examinations for Compensation and Pension (C&P) benefits in violation of Department of Veterans Affairs policy.

“So that means hundreds of veterans didn’t get a fair shot to get competent medical opinions about their condition,” said Ben Krause, a Twin Cities based attorney specializing in veteran’s issues.

According to the KARE11 reporters, they started filing FOIAs to inquire into what they perceived as a problem back in the Spring and the VA started corresponding with Congressman Tim Waltz’ office in regards to the problem;

In a letter to the VA, Rep. Walz states he’d been told that “over 300 veteran-patients received initial examinations by doctors not authorized to perform TBI examinations”.

It was soon after Walz’ office got involved that veterans started getting notices that they were eligible to be reexamined. The VA is like a gigantic artichoke – the more you pick at it, the more gross, ugly stuff you find.

According to a very poorly written article in Fox News, some employee at the South Dakota Department of Veterans’ Affairs Black Hills Health Care System tossed 1100 veterans’ records into a dumpster. Those records languished unsecured for two days until another employee found them and recovered the records.

That was in May. Veterans weren’t notified until the end of July that their data may have been exposed to criminals.

The VA alerted the 1,100 military veterans of the breach in letters mailed last Wednesday. The letter informed recipients they could request a free credit report to ensure their personal data was not being misused.

Forbes defended the lag in making the notification, saying that the VA was following procedures.

The files included names, Social Security numbers, phone numbers and addresses. They did not include medical histories.

Well, the loss of veterans’ PII has happened so often, you would have thought that the Veterans’ Affairs Department would have different procedures in place by now. Maybe they should look at that.

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs threatened to start closing medical facilities if Congress wouldn’t allow them to take money out of the Veterans’ Choice Program, you know, that program that is less than a year old and was supposed to relieve pressure from an over-booked healthcare system. So, Congress folded like Kmart lawnchairs.

“While I was disappointed to see the VA use scare tactics and threaten to close hospitals as a way to shift away blame for their poor management, I was more than proud to cast my vote today to solve this issue,” said Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., who sits on the Senate veterans committee.

VA Secretary Robert McDonald told Congress in hearings over the past month that the number of appointments at medical centers increased substantially after the agency moved to fix the scandal over manipulated wait times for patients to see their doctors.

[…]

“Without this legislation, the VA could run out of money by September,” said Rep. Sanford Bishop, D-Ga. “Costs have exploded by more than 10 percent in the last year as a result of higher demand, while the budget increased by only 2.8 percent.”

So, the Veterans’ Choice Program was just a slush fund. The Veterans’ Choice Program hadn’t been fully implemented, there was no introduction to the program from the VA to veterans, before the White House was complaining that the program wasn’t working. They’ve been trying to raid the funds since Spring. And the rubber stamp Congress is more than willing to bend to whatever the White House wants.